The present invention relates to a device for the mobile phone handset, more particularly, it relates to a device for the mobile phone handset which is interfaced to an external keyboard through a multimedia card (MMC) slot, and a method for transmitting the data with such device.
In recent years, the telecommunication services have been developed vigorously, and the trend of the market with liberalization has been formed, wherein considerable opportunities are concealed in the wireless communication. Thus, the normal communication industries, from the system equipment enterprises of the upstream to the terminal equipment enterprises, such as electronic notebook (or referred to as Personal Digital Assistant, PDA) or the mobile phone handset enterprise; of the downstream, from the equipment manufacturers to the telecommunication companies, all of them are competing to occupy a scat in the communication market.
In the wireless communication, the mobile data can be served to receive and transmit short messages in the Chinese format, to receive the finance stock quotations, e-mail, speech mailbox, information inquiry and the like. So a set of light, thin, short and small electronic notebooks, has been developed by many enterprises. Furthermore, they are capable of two-way transmission and the Internet is popularized. Therefore, they will be products of the new generation.
However, besides the electronic notebooks, the mobile phone handsets (abbreviated as handset hereinafter) which have been developed earlier and involve infinitive potentiality are in tremendous demand on the market. Apart from using the handset directly for speech communication, using it for transmitting the short message data is increasingly popular. Therefore, it is desirable to have handsets that can receive and transmit e-mail incorporated the above electronic notebooks, as well as the handsets for carrying out the video transmission.
The front view of a conventional handset is shown as in FIG. 1. Because the limitation of the volume of the handset 100, only the digit keys of 0-9 and several function keys of the key 120 can be installed under the screen 110 (for the handsets of the new generation, the size of screen 110 is increasing, and the space of the key 120 is reducing). When it is required to input the characters or short message other than the digit, only the digit keys of 0-9 can be used, and other characters must be incorporated into the digit keys. For example, alphabets a, b, and c are also involved in the digit key xe2x80x9c2xe2x80x9d of the key 120. When xe2x80x9cbxe2x80x9d is input by the user, the user must realize first that xe2x80x9cbxe2x80x9d corresponds to the digit key xe2x80x9c2xe2x80x9d, then, xe2x80x9cbxe2x80x9d will not derived until this key has been pressed for three times (if Chinese characters are input, then the input method of which will be more complicated).
The user may bear with this discrepancy, if only few characters are required to input to the handset, for example, when a directory function or a short message function are established. But if the handset is used to transfer e-mail, the user will face the input a large amount of characters. At this time, if it is input by the fixed keyboard on the handset only, the input action will be tedious and inefficient. This will be a problem that greatly disturbs the user since the E-mail transmission on handset is an inevitable trend today.
In view of the invention background described above, the input method of the conventional handset is rather inconvenient, since it must use the multipurpose digital keys for operation. But nowadays, a large amount of the electronic information is transferred, the action that utilizes a handset to input will occur more often. For example, the transfer of e-mail is one such action. At this time, inputting by a single handset will be complicated and inefficient. Thus, the main object of the present invention is to implement the input action of the handset with the aid of connecting externally a portable keyboard.
Another object of the present invention is to connect externally a portable keyboard by utilizing the original multimedia card slot transmission interface of the handset without the need for preparing another interface.
Yet another object of the present invention is to utilize such portable keyboard which is connected externally for the convenience of the data transmission.
The portable keyboard according to the above objects of the present invention comprises a multimedia card slot transmission interface. This is an interface with seven pins, and there are several keys on the keyboard for the convenience of inputting. Separate microprocessor (MPU) and random access memory (RAM) are also included in the external keyboard. When the portable keyboard is inserted to the handset via an MMC interface, the connectors on the MMC interface will be checked first by the handset, if it is MMC memory card, then the service program of MMC will be called, otherwise, the external keyboard mode will be entered, and the portable external keyboard will be instructed to enter the interrupt mode.
After the external keyboard entering the interrupt mode, the sequence number of the keyboard will be scanned, and the value that represents the key will be calculated and stored in the random access memory of the external keyboard, then an interrupt request will be sent to the handset. After the interrupt request from MMC interface is received by the handset, the interrupt service program of the external keyboard for the handset will be entered, then the external keyboard is instructed to enter the data transmission mode, and the key value will be obtained by the handset from the specific random access memory of the external keyboard via MMC interface, and the key value obtained will be input to the buffer memory of the handset""s own. In the meantime, the external keyboard will be set to the interrupt mode again for receiving the next batch of data.
Through the above process, the key value of the external keyboard can be transferred to the handset and displayed on the LCD display screen of the handset, and the input method of the portable external keyboard of the present invention is completed.
Separate microprocessor and random access memory are included in the portable external keyboard of the present invention, thus a separate system is formed. When the portable external keyboard is connected to the handset and after the keyboard being instructed to enter the interrupt mode, the external keyboard is used to input a large amount of the data, for example, to input a directory or a short message, even to send E-mail and the like by pressing the key, and it is not limited by few keys on the handset and the complicated input method, so it is more simple and easier. In the meantime, the standardized MCC interface is used by the external keyboard, thus the same interface can be used commonly with the original MMC card so that further developing a different interface is not necessary and the multi-function effect is reached.
The preferred embodiments of the present invention will now be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings, wherein: